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Here you will read the innermost thoughts and feelings of inspired seekers who have gone before you. Some names you may know… others you will be glad to meet!
We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason, or even of self-interest… Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day.
Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
A man in not educated because he talks much; the learned man is he who is patient, free from hatred and fear.
There is one great and universal wish of mankind expressed in all religions, in all art and philosophy, and in all human life: the wish to pass beyond himself as he now is.
If you made a list of everything you own, everything you think of as you, everything you prefer, that list would be the distance between you and the living truth.
And in eternity no mockery will wound the lover because he was foolish enough to make himself a laughing-stock through hoping everything.
The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions.
In fearing to make an effort to escape from conditions that are fatal to us, because the future is obscure and unknown, we are like passengers on a sinking ship, who crowd into the cabin and refuse to leave it, because they have not the courage to enter the boat that would carry them to shore.
Never try to please an envious person.
In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities, and there is no joy in things that do not exist.
There is a sickness
Which puts some of us in distemper, but
I cannot name the disease; and it is caught
Of you that yet are well.
There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works. In idleness alone is there perpetual despair.
Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables — meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.
Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Nothing is a greater barrier to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Human anguish is the product of the loss by man of his true identity.
His overthrow heap’d happiness upon him;
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little:
And, to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.
It follows absolutely, that one who uses his understanding correctly, can fall a prey to no sorrow.
There is nothing so delightful as the hearing or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of a man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.
